Our New Publishing Platform Will Make You a Better Writer

Forbes has been publishing hundreds of articles a day for more than five years. As a Data Scientist, when I hear about that volume of data, the first thing that jumps to mind is: what can we learn from it? Are there best practices we can glean? Can our volume of work make future content better? The answer is yes.

"That’s fantastic", we thought. These areas need work and as far as we can tell our colleagues are making great progress.

There's a lot we can do to improve both our workflow and publishing tools but we wanted to go beyond. What if instead of creating tools, we created an assistant? A machine with which humans could collaborate.

However, we are also well aware that building intelligent machines isn't something immediately feasible and that the quest for artificial general intelligence is at its peak.

The question for us is: how far can we realistically go and create something that adds value to our writers and business?

In his upcoming book Superminds, MIT professor Thomas Malone suggests a way forward. He writes that there is an evolutionary process between tools and "collaboration machines": first they evolve into assistants and from there into peers.

Form tools to peers: the evolution of AI in business. Adapted from Thomas Malone's upcoming book, Superminds.Forbes Media based on Thomas Malone's "Supermind".

Prof. Malone writes that the key difference between tools and assistants is essentially two things: initiative and ability to collaborate.

Creating a machine that has initiative isn't too difficult: we can create a computer program that constantly searches for patterns and sends notifications to users when it identifies something that is worth their attention. We have to balance that with great user experience so we don't annoy users, but that is something we can tackle. What about inputting the ability to collaborate?

Learning to collaborate

We think that writers will only collaborate with a publishing AI if they both find it enjoyable and useful. So we came up with three principles to achieve that goal:

Learn from authors at all times: we are balancing both the strengths of all authors and the specifics of each author.

Don’t interrupt: our AI system is being designed to learn how authors interact with it, optimizing for the sweet-spot between usefulness and subtleness.

Be personable: all the suggestions that our assistant generates “sound” and “feel” as if they are coming from a single entity - maybe even give it a name.

A great publication assistant learns from the authors that use it every day and provide suggestions back that are specifically tailored for that author. If an author only likes certain suggestions (for instance, to add an image), the platform learns to only give those suggestions. If an author is working to develop its Facebook audience, the platform provides real-time suggestions on how that content will perform in that platform. And if an author typically writes about the Trump administration and a new story is developing, the platform sends that author a notification with key bullet points so that she can get a head-start when writing a new story. And so on.

Our ambition is that all Forbes authors collaborate with an AI system that knows how to help them best. We want authors to enjoy collaborating with their AI-powered publication assistant and extract value from it. Excellent stories can result from that collaboration. We look forward to releasing Bertie to the world this summer.